AI sovereignty: how Europe builds and owns its tech future

‍Date: 8 December 2026

Time: 6:00 PM - 9:30 PM CET

Location: Brevo, 17 Rue Salneuve, 75017 Paris, France

Hosts:
Kath Easthope, Co-Founder & CEO, Boardwave
Armand Thiberge, Founder & CEO, Brevo

Boardwave and Brevo are coming together to host an exclusive VIP evening in Paris, one of Boardwave's largest gatherings in France to date. Over drinks and food, Europe's most ambitious tech and AI leaders will take on one of the defining questions for our industry: how Europe builds, owns and scales the technology its future depends on.

Our guest of honour is Armand Thiberge, Founder and CEO of Brevo. Armand started the business in Paris and Noida in 2012 and has built it into one of Europe's leading customer engagement platforms and one of France's tech unicorns. His ambition is to build a global European CRM leader that can compete with the US giants. In a fireside conversation, Armand will share what it has taken to get here, the decisions that mattered most, and where he's taking Brevo next.

Armand has also become one of the leading voices on European AI sovereignty. He recently brought together tech founders and leaders from France, the UK, Germany and Italy to call for European public investment in frontier AI. The models shaping the field today are American or Chinese, and training at the frontier takes more capital than Europe's fragmented market can raise privately. The proposal is a European AI champion backed by an initial €20 billion of public investment, enough to hire 2,000 engineers and researchers and build models that rank in the global top three.

It's a bold idea, but Europe has done this before with Airbus and Ariane, and there are signs it can happen again. Sovereignty matters more than ever for our continent. That makes public investment not only crucial but also quickly scalable, as a growing number of European companies and public institutions want to turn to sovereign tech solutions.

Back projects like this now, and Europe can help lead the AI age rather than just buy from it.

That's why Boardwave and Brevo want to bring this conversation into the room. The proposal raises questions every European founder and board is now facing. Who controls their data? How much should they rely on a small number of non-European providers? And can Europe produce AI champions of its own? We'll close the evening with a panel of European tech leaders taking on exactly these questions.

Key discussion areas

• What AI sovereignty actually means for a European software company, beyond the headlines
• The case for public investment in a European frontier model, and what €20 billion could realistically achieve
• Where relying on non-European models, cloud and infrastructure creates real business risk, and where it doesn't
• What it will take for Europe to build and scale its own AI champions
• The role of founders, investors and policymakers in backing European tech
• Where CEOs should be focusing their AI strategy over the next 12-24 months

‍

‍